


When You Trust Me

by ArgentumCivitas



Category: Reno: 911!
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ensemble Cast, F/M, First Date, Guns, Imagined Backstory, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Injury, Meet-Cute, Neighbors, Novel, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, References to Canon-Typical Violence, Romance, Smoking, mutual pining around the edges, not an endorsement of real-life law enforcement, picky eating, slow burn in quotation marks, stories from college, the deputies know they're on a TV show, there is briefly only one bed, winter holidays
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-19
Updated: 2021-03-28
Packaged: 2021-03-28 14:00:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30140613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArgentumCivitas/pseuds/ArgentumCivitas
Summary: “Are you a stripper? It’s just that I didn’t think a stripper would ever even date Junior. Or that anyone would, really.”Most of the people who end up in Reno are usually doing their best to get away from someone, but whether it was on purpose or by accident, these two have finally found exactly who they were looking for.
Relationships: Travis Junior/Original Female Character
Comments: 10
Kudos: 1





	1. Catch 'Em By Surprise

**Author's Note:**

> This story starts around a slightly time-shifted version of the beginning episodes of Season 2—they’re happening a little later in the year than they originally aired and the precipitating event isn’t one that occurs in canon—but sharp readers and watchers will notice some shout-outs to future events, locations, and perps. All of the creators of Reno 911! refuse to let any aspect of previously established canon interfere with a good setup, story, or punchline, so the same applies here, and in some cases, I’ve had to creatively fill in some blanks. I hope the overall effect is at least reasonably plausible, given the constraints of the world in which the deputies find themselves.
> 
> If you like reading this half as much as I liked writing it, that means I had twice as much fun writing it as you had reading it. Thank you in advance for your time, and please enjoy.

_Meeting a new neighbor, morning coffee, and misunderstandings all around._

* * *

As Garcia was driving him home in the squad car, Junior was starting to think that maybe having a broken collarbone wouldn't be so bad. Sure, it was Thursday afternoon, and getting patched up down at the hospital had taken what seemed like forever, but now he was chock-full of morphine and had a half-bottle of oxys in his pocket that he’d probably be able to flip for some quick cash. Even better, he wasn't going to be expected to go out paintballing with Garcia this weekend, about the only thing the two of them did together besides patrol; despite Garcia's profoundly shitty aim and complete inability to win a match, Junior was a good enough marksman (thanks to Uncle Sam and plenty of practice down at the range) that they broke even most of the time. But it still didn't mean he enjoyed spending a perfectly good Sunday afternoon listening to Garcia bitch about everything, from the punk kids they usually played against to any festering interdepartmental dramas to Garcia’s off-again, on-again thing with Clemmy.

Junior’s right shoulder twinged as the car hit the bump of the trailer park entrance, but he didn't care. If that pretty nurse at the hospital hadn't shot him full of drugs, he'd be screaming in pain, but the morphine had not only turned down the volume of the world, but also blunted every single edge. Neither of them spoke as Garcia navigated through the mostly empty park; the headlights illuminated just half a dozen trailers in various stages of disrepair, with Junior's out on the farthest edge, closest to the encroaching scrub desert and the slope of the foothills. However, when he saw the dusty, but brand-new, Gulf Stream parked just one space away from his, he thought he was hallucinating. The equally dusty black Jeep Wrangler Rubicon with green-and-white Colorado license plates parked alongside it only added to the feeling of abject unreality, until Garcia pulled into the space where Junior's shitbox car was usually parked and asked, "You got a neighbor now?"

"Fuck if I know, man," Junior said as he reached over to open the door. His shoulder called out a dull, echoing thud of protest as his right elbow hit the back of the seat. Doing everything left-handed for the next couple of months or so was going to suck, but that was a problem for tomorrow. "Hey, thanks for the ride."

"Least I could do," said Garcia as Junior slid out of the car and rose to his feet, somewhat unsteadily. "It was kinda my fault."

 _You're fuckin' right it was,_ Junior thought as he fumbled for his keys. _You could have shot that fucker before she tackled me_. "Not like you woulda hit her, though."

"What was that?" said Garcia. Across the other space, in the new trailer, a light flicked on. 

"Nothin'," Junior said, closing the door and heading to his trailer. "See you later."

Junior fumbled with the lock as Garcia pulled away. He couldn't move his right hand to get any leverage, and he was too high to find the keyhole. He muttered to himself, "Come on, you son of a..." but was cut off by another voice, a woman's voice, asking, "Do you need some help?"

" **Shit!** " he said, startled, as he dropped the keys. They fell through the hole in the two front steps and into the patch of scrubby weeds beneath them. He turned to see who could possibly be talking to him. It was a woman, easily a few inches shorter than him and slender, with dark hair pulled back into a low ponytail and wearing a black T-shirt and dark-washed jeans. She looked at Junior with a soft smile, revealing a dimple in her right cheek, as she moved to find the keys...which wasn't hard, considering the stairs had no sides. Junior just looked on as she rummaged around in the weeds, finally finding the keys glinting in the twilight.

"Want me to get that door for you?" she asked. Junior could only nod, thinking briefly of the truly shameful state of the interior of his trailer and deciding that it didn't matter. All he wanted to do was get inside, pop a pill, and get off his feet.

She squeezed past him to unlock the door, and he felt a twitch in his crotch as her ass brushed past it. He thought briefly about putting that pill on hold and jerking off instead, though it always felt weird doing it with his left hand. _Hell, ain’t no reason I can't do both_ , he thought as the lock clicked and the door opened to reveal the clutter inside. She had already gone inside to hold the door for him, though there wasn't much room among the empty beer cans, dirty laundry, and general detritus.

"I'm Em, by the way," she said as he made his way down the short hall to his unmade bed, falling down to sit on the edge of it with a loud exhale. "Em Dalton. I guess we're neighbors now."

"Huh," said Junior. Em's last name sounded familiar, but he couldn't quite place it. Besides, it didn't matter anyway. She seemed nice and was even kind of cute, though skinnier than the women he usually went for when he’d saved up enough to make it down to the Mustang Ranch. "I'm Junior."

"Nice to meet you, Junior," Em said, leaning against the bedroom doorframe. _"_ What happened to you?" She indicated the sling.

"Oh, well, I got straight-up fuckin' tackled by T.T., she got up a head of steam and busted out of Garcia's headlock and came right for me. Wrong place, wrong time." _Story of my fuckin' life_ , he thought.

"Does it hurt?" she asked.

"It would, 'cept they shot me up with a fuck-ton of morphine and I can't feel shit. No worse than the last few times somethin’ like this happened," Junior said, shifting in his seat and reaching for the bottle of pills. "Shit, why'd I put this in my right pocket?"

"I'll get it," Em said, stepping forward, gently pushing him back, and snaking her hand into his right front pocket. That twitch from before built rapidly into a full erection as Em wrapped her hand around the bottle. Junior couldn't remember the last time he had a hard-on that wasn't caused by porn, the simple physics of the morning, or by someone he paid. And was it his imagination, or did she linger for a moment, brushing the back of her fingers against it? By the time he decided that yes, it really wasn't an accident, she was back with a glass of water and one pill, and the desire was already beginning to subside. The glass was filthy, but that couldn't be helped right now. "Here."

Em waited for Junior to knock back the pill and just said, “Let’s get you into bed,” and by that point, he was in no mood to argue, even though he was most of the way there already. He could tell he wasn’t going to be getting up for a while as he stretched out, made no word of protest as she took off his shoes, just made himself as comfortable as he could despite the disorder.

He closed his eyes as the pill started to kick in, waves of preternatural calm mixing with the morphine still in his system. He forgot for a moment, how he’d gotten there, if the whole thing were real, and forced his eyes open once to see her steady gaze, green-brown eyes looking straight back at him. But then he was gone. He was floating, weightless, suspended in a liquid haze. He heard the door close, then open again, and felt himself being covered with something soft and warm as he drifted off into a deep, dreamless sleep.

* * *

Junior awoke the next morning to sunlight streaming in the windows. The soft warmth from last night turned out to be a clean, dark gray, plush blanket that looked incongruously out of place in his run-down trailer. Speaking of which…he rolled over on his side, propping himself up on his good elbow, and took a look around. From what he could see, it was definitely a lot tidier in there than it had been last night. It looked like his dirty laundry had been picked up off the floor and put into the laundry basket, while the empties and crusty wads of toilet paper were gone, too.

He got up, gingerly, trying not to jostle his shoulder, and made his way down the hall. The mess was gone from the rest of the trailer, too—the last thing he'd done before he’d gotten hurt, the night before last, was give the Mossberg shotgun a thorough cleaning, and while it was back on its rack above the door, he'd left the post-cleanup job for later. All that detritus was gone, too. The run-down Winnebago still looked pretty shabby, but it was now considerably less sad.

Junior lit up a cigarette, snuck a peek out the window across the way. The black Jeep and Gulf Stream were still there, right where they’d been last night. He vaguely remembered dropping his keys, a cute girl with dark brown hair reaching into his pocket, her green-brown eyes the last thing he saw before falling asleep. _Guess it wasn't a dream after all_. _Should I go over there and thank her? Fuck, what did she say her name was again?_

He stubbed out the cigarette, looked out the window again—and saw that she was heading his way. _Shit_. _Shit, shit, fuck._ He didn't have time to do anything more than run his left hand through his hair (not that it really needed it) before she knocked on the door. "Junior?" she said. "It's Em, from last night. Are you awake?"

 _Em. That's easy. Got it._ "Yeah," he said, opening the door to let her in. Em was wearing a heathered green T-shirt, presumably the same dark jeans from last night, and beat-up gray Chuck Taylors, and she was carrying two mugs of coffee, solid white china mugs. She handed him one as she stepped inside.

"I didn't know how you liked your coffee, so I made it the same as mine," Em said.

He sat down at the newly cleared table and took a sip. "This...is awful. What the fuck is it?"

"Yeah, so I drink coffee like a teenage girl, light and very sweet,” she said. “There’s some more left if you want something different, though.”

“Nah, it’s fine,” he said, though the sticky-sweet taste lingered. She put her mug down on the table, opposite him, as he flexed his right hand and shifted his shoulder inside the sling, testing it out. His original assessment was right—it wasn’t quite as bad as he had thought. Uncomfortable, sure, but more annoying than painful.

“How are you feeling?” Em asked. “You seemed pretty messed up last night.”

“It’s better’n it was, but it still ain’t great,” Junior said. “Where’d them pills end up?” He didn’t really feel like he needed one, but better safe than sorry, he figured.

Em opened up one of the cabinets and took down the orange bottle, but then stopped. “Are you sure? Trust me, I’ve got something that’ll probably work almost as well, if you want to try it out.”

Junior thought for a moment. _Every one of those I don’t take is more cash down the road_. “Sure, I’ll give it a shot.”

“I’ll be right back,” she said. “How do you really like your coffee?”

“Just black,” he said. She grabbed his coffee mug but left her own, heading down the trailer steps and across the cleared lot into her own Gulf Stream. Junior watched her go, trying not to be too obvious. If he could manage to keep it together and not be creepy or weird, free coffee and possibly prescription painkillers might just be the tip of the iceberg.

True to her word, Em was back in a few minutes with a new cup of black coffee and a Ziploc baggie that had about forty elongated white pills in it. “Take one every four to six hours or so, whenever it hurts,” she said, pulling one out and dropping it in his left hand. He tossed it in his mouth and washed it down with a long pull off the new coffee, which was still warm, though not piping hot. This was no standard Folgers, he could tell—it was rich and smooth and almost a little chocolaty.

“Thanks,” he said, as she took the seat opposite him and picked up her own cup. He was suddenly, acutely conscious of two things, almost simultaneously. First, that there was a cute girl, in his trailer, and that he had no ability to take advantage of the situation, what with his broken collarbone and all; and second, that there was a cute girl. In his trailer. And that he had absolutely no idea how or even why she was there in the first place. Since the first choice wasn’t an option, he went with the second. “Okay, what in the fuck is goin’ on here?” he asked.

“What do you mean?” Em said. She looked genuinely surprised.

“I mean, I don't even know who in the fuck you are, much less how you showed up out of nowhere and…” he trailed off. “What the fuck do you want? How the fuck do you even know who I am?"

Her face fell and she wrapped her hands around her cup. "From the show," she said, softly, her eyes lowered. _The show. Of course_. _From the fuckin' show_. "But it's not like that!" Em said, defensively, looking straight at him before he could say anything. "I can’t believe how they make all of you look so stupid!"

"Honestly, everyone around here is pretty fuckin' stupid," Junior said. He took another sip of his own coffee. _Fuck me, that’s good_. "Reno is a fuckin' stupid town full of fuckin' assholes, and they only put our fuck-ups on TV."

"That's what bothers me," Em said. "I wanted to see for myself."

"Well, here the fuck we are," Junior said. "Is it what you thought it'd be?" He gestured to the trailer, which admittedly looked both more and less sad by the light of day, somehow.

"Not quite," Em said, with a note of hope in her voice. "I thought you'd have a lot more guns."

Junior laughed at that admission. "I don't keep 'em where you can see them. Surprised you didn't find ‘em when you cleaned up."

Em smiled, the dimple revealing itself again. "I didn't go poking around, I just stuck to the obvious stuff. And it's obvious you need at least some help, at least while you're healing. I mean, where’s your car?"

“Ah, fuck,” he said, remembering the previous day. “Back at the station.”

"I'll give you a ride there, if you want," Em said. "Whenever you're ready." She took a sip of her own coffee, looked out the window, and he had a chance to study her, for a moment. Last night, he'd only registered that she was cute. This morning, considerably more sober, he noticed that her face was pale, but her skinny arms and small hands were tanned about four shades darker and dotted with freckles, and when she tucked her dark brown hair back behind her ears, they were sunburned bright red. He'd seen punks and street kids drift into town looking like that after spending a few weeks out in the desert at Burning Man, but she didn't seem like the type who'd be into that scene—and he remembered, _wasn't the festival going on out there right now?_

"Where’d you come from, anyway?" he asked, genuinely curious.

"Denver," she said, flatly, in a tone of voice that seemed to shut down further inquiry. There wasn't anywhere else for the conversation to go from there, so he just finished off the rest of his now-lukewarm coffee in three long swallows and thought about what might have prompted her to come from over a thousand miles away and end up right next to him.

"Might as well get this over with," he said, handing her the empty cup, and Em waited for him outside while he awkwardly got ready to go.

Junior was surprised to find that Em's Jeep was a stick shift, and he was just as surprised when she didn’t dump the clutch or strip any of the gears as they set off. They didn’t have the chance for much more conversation on the drive—Em clearly didn’t know her way around Reno and he had to give her a lot of direction, especially since the traffic was lighter than usual at that time of the morning.

Once they reached the station, he had her pull around to the back side of the building, near the employee parking lot. "Can you drive?" she asked as she parked next to his car, which, like most things in his life, was profoundly embarrassing to any outsider.

"Yeah, I'm fine," he said as he went to unlock the driver's side door. His shoulder didn’t even hurt by now, though he could tell where the pain had been. "It's an automatic, and..." he trailed off as he saw the window to the briefing room. Six pairs of eyes were staring at him. God, Wiegel even had her mouth agape in disbelief. "Shit, I gotta deal with this. Thanks for the ride."

"Any time, Junior," Em said as she put the Jeep in gear. "See you later."

 _Son of a bitch,_ Junior thought as he made his way into the building. _Now I’m going to have to figure out what to say to these dumbasses._

"...and that's what hap—" Dangle stopped mid-word when Junior opened the door. "Hey, y'all," Junior said as he grabbed a donut. "Just came to get my car."

"Well, I'm glad to see you're all right," said Dangle. "Let's talk after this briefing?"

Junior started to agree, momentarily grateful that he wouldn't have to hear it from everyone all at once. But then Williams, goddamn Williams, practically screamed, "Are we not gonna talk? About Junior getting dropped off here by a woman?"

"I didn't know hookers could drive you places, too. Is that like a full-service extra?" Wiegel said.

"Yeah, Junior, how much did you have to pay her for that?" Clemmy added, with a smirk.

"And where'd you get the money?" Garcia asked. "Didn't think you'd get the chance to flip them pills already."

"She’s not a hooker!" Junior burst in. "She's my neighbor, and she brought me here to pick up my car, because fuckin' Garcia let **T.T. break my fuckin’ collarbone and I had to go to the fuckin’ hospital!!** ”

"There's gotta be something wrong with her, then," Jones said. "To live next to you, I mean."

"Maybe there is, I don't fuckin’ know," Junior said. "Can we just finish this fuckin’ briefing without mentioning it again?"

Clemmy gave Williams a knowing look and they giggled to themselves, which made Junior’s ears burn and made him almost wish that he'd never gotten into Em's car in the first place. _But even if there was something wrong with her, she was still pretty cute._

* * *

After the briefing was complete, Dangle pulled Junior aside and said he could take half of the next week off, but then he'd need to come back and work the desk until he healed up. Not getting shot at, spit on, or otherwise injured sounded just fine to him, so he eagerly accepted. It'd give him time to think.

Thinking was not one of Junior's favorite pastimes. That's probably why he spent so much time fucked-up in one way or another. Joining the Army straight out of high school was the easy choice, so that's what he did; they told him what to do and he did it, no thinking required. Ending up in Reno was another decision he’d made by default—after getting out of the Army, Reno was the cheapest of all possible destinations, and once he’d made it out there, the Sheriff’s Department was the least picky employer in town. The pay was low, the hours were terrible, and the people were the very definition of a motley crew, but it was a perfectly reasonable way to punch the clock day to day, and some parts of the job were pretty fun.

Things in his life were going totally fine until those damn TV cameras arrived and the show started airing. Junior blamed Dangle, as the boss, for getting them all into this mess, because it seemed like the criminals had started acting extra crazy once they realized they’d have a chance to get on TV. And now he had a new neighbor, seemingly out of nowhere, who knew more about him than he did about her.

On one hand, it was a little flattering to have someone go to so much trouble to look him up. Jones seemed to pull in a new piece of tail every couple of weeks, and even Dangle had his fair share of masculine admirers. One cute girl tracking him down would put Junior one ahead of Garcia, at the very least. On the other hand, it was a little weird that she was living right next to him, and his injury meant he wouldn’t be able to capitalize on the situation for at least a few months, so the whole thing made him feel decidedly out of sorts.

It took Junior longer at the station than he expected; he had to fill out a bunch of neglected paperwork from a series of previous arrests, and then a raft of worker’s comp applications and forms, and then, because it had been bothering him all day, he snuck on to Google and found out that when someone had green-brown eyes, the color was actually called _hazel_ ; but Williams had come crashing through the room right then and he got the browser window closed just before she could see what he was looking at. She would never have let him hear the end of it if she’d noticed that it wasn’t porn.

When he finally made it back home, Em was outside in a lawn chair next to her trailer, reading a thick book. _Do people actually read books anymore these days?_ She closed the book, tucked her dark brown hair behind her ears, and waved hello as he parked the car. "Are you takin’ a class or somethin'?" he asked as he slammed the door.

"This? Oh, no, I’m just reading it again. It's one of my favorites." The title was _The Valley of Decision_. "It's a great story and it makes me think about a place I used to live.”

"Huh." Junior couldn't remember the last book he'd read. “You don’t say.”

"Never mind about that, though. How's the shoulder?" she asked, changing the subject. It was better after the pill she’d given him that morning, but now that he didn’t have to drive anywhere, it was definitely time for something harder.

"Gotta admit, it ain’t great," Junior said as he headed for his trailer and some sweet relief.

"Hey, are you hungry?" Em asked as he unlocked the door. "Want to come over for dinner?"

This was the closest thing Junior had had to a date in a long time, so he almost didn't know what to say. "S-sure, I guess."

"How about I go pick up a pizza? I'll let you know when it's here," Em said before disappearing into her own trailer.

He had enough time to pop one of the oxys, figure out how to change into something more comfortable, and smoke a couple of cigarettes before she knocked on his door again. This time she didn't come inside, just waited for him to open the door and said, "Come on over."

Em's Gulf Stream was brand-new and looked like it just rolled off the showroom floor, but it was oddly devoid of anything resembling personal decor. The only notable thing about it were the piles of books. There were stacks of old, used paperback books on almost every flat surface, save the table and one chair, and a marble-covered black-and-white composition book open on the table, with a pen in the middle of one of the pages. It was clear that she’d been in the middle of writing something, but he couldn’t read the spiky handwriting.

"Sorry," Em said, gathering a stack of books from the table's other chair. She split them into two stacks and balanced them between some others, then scooped up the composition book with the pen inside and casually placed it on top of another stack of books.

"You read all of these?" Junior asked, taking the newly empty seat.

"Not yet," she said, rummaging in the cupboard for plates. _Real plates_ , he thought as he heard the clink of china. "Probably by the end of the month, though. I like reading." She put down two plates, one in front of him with three slices, one on the opposite side of the table with a single, slender slice. "Something to drink?"

"I'll take a beer," he said, reflexively, even though he didn't really want one. The pill had kicked in and he was feeling half-drunk already.

"Sorry," Em said. "I should have said, all I have is sparkling water. Plain or lime?"

"How's about lime, if we're gettin' fancy," Junior said, but he regretted saying it as soon as the words came out, because Em's face flushed red. She grabbed two green glass bottles of Perrier and twisted the cap off one, then the other, savagely. She set them down with a thunk.

"Jeez, I'm sorry," he said. "I'm an asshole. Thank you, I just ain't used to this."

"To what?" she said.

"To havin' someone else around who lives someplace nice," he gestured to the trailer, with his good arm, "and who reads books, and who only drinks sparklin' water."

"It's not all I drink," Em said. "It's just all I have right now." She sat down, looked at him frankly with those green-brown— _hazel_ —eyes. "I'll get something else next time. Don't worry about it."

Her words were not lost on him as he started on his meal. _Next time. Guess I didn’t fuck up too bad if there's going to be a next time_. They were quiet for a few minutes—she had just a few bites—until she said, "Hey, can you give me your phone?"

"Sure," he said, handing it over without a second thought. "What for?"

"You should probably have my number," Em said, programming it in, "in case you need anything." She pulled out her own phone and called it from his, hanging up after the first ring and repeating the process. "There."

"Now that was pretty fuckin' smooth," Junior said out loud, though he thought he was just thinking it to himself. He was briefly mortified, for the second time in about five minutes, but fortunately, Em just laughed.

"I mean it,” she said. “You can call me any time.”


	2. Dreaming With The Lights On

_Healing up, ancient history, and Halloween._

* * *

Junior and Em fell into a comfortable routine over the next few weeks. He worked his shifts down at the station like usual, but since he was stuck on the booking desk and never knew when something would come in, Junior would text Em instead of calling her, and she’d usually reply pretty quickly. It would give him a little charge every time his phone beeped, even if he were in the middle of answering calls or filling out paperwork and couldn’t get to it right away.

It got to the point where he’d let her know when he was leaving work and Em would ask him what he was hungry for, no matter the time of day or night, and it would be there by the time he got home. She’d always order enough for him to have a meal the next day, but she never ate more than a few bites of anything they picked. When she had a choice, Em seemed to live on strong coffee, dry toast, plain chicken, sparkling water, fancy chocolate bars that she’d break up into tiny pieces, and bananas at a very particular stage of ripeness, plus a handful of vitamin supplements. Junior thought this was weird, at first, but then he figured that everyone had a little something weird about them and that this was milder than most of the stuff he usually saw from the public.

Besides texting back and forth when he had the time, they’d talk in person, usually over cheap beers—Junior's contribution to their meals, though she’d never have more than just one or two. He told her stories about growing up in the trailer park back home, running hell for leather all over with his brothers (to the abject despair of his grandmother) and a short gloss of what it was like in the Army. Through careful pruning, he’d gotten it down to all excitement and no boredom, even though the actual experience was probably ninety to ninety-five percent boring, considering.

Em, for her part, never directly answered any of the questions he asked about her family. She didn’t bother with lying, and besides, he would have been able to tell if she did. Listening to enough people try to talk their way out of major trouble, or even just a speeding ticket, had honed his ability to tell when someone was lying to a fine edge, and he wasn’t detecting any of that here. Instead, she would give evasive non-answers to his questions or say things like, “You don’t want to hear about that,” and turn the conversation back to his day or to things they’d talked about before, and he didn’t press her, mostly because of the novelty of having someone take a genuine interest in him.

In all their conversations, the one thing they didn't discuss was the show. Or rather, they did, but only once, very early in their acquaintance. One of the camera guys, Joe, followed Junior home one day for what he called some "interstitial footage" and caught Em's trailer in the shot. She was home reading at the time, or maybe writing in one of her endless composition books, and came storming out, absolutely livid. Em refused to sign any kind of release—even a promise to blur out her face wasn't good enough. Joe ended up giving her the tape out of the camera and after he left, she pulled out the film, thoroughly exposing every frame. Junior was surprised by how insistent she was, especially since she'd told him that she'd seen him on the show in the first place, but she just said, "It doesn't bother me if you're on the show, but I can’t be a part of it."

"If you feel that strong about it, I'll tell 'em they can’t film you," he said.

"Thank you," Em said. "And please apologize to Joe for me, I was very rude to him." He did, the next day, but the two dozen donuts that arrived from Donut In Law the day after that from “A Grateful Citizen” were also much appreciated by everyone around the station.

After a week of dancing around the subject, Junior flat-out asked Em what she did for work, since she always seemed to be around, no matter if he was working days or nights or anything in between. "I’m between jobs right now,” she said, not avoiding a direct question for once.

"Yeah, but what do you live on?" he asked, half expecting her to confess to something illegal. “Don’t worry, whatever it is, I’m not gonna arrest you.”

Em shook her head, with a look of dismay, and said, "Savings, mostly, and some good investments from my grandfather.”

Junior whistled, long and drawn-out. "If you ain’t gotta worry too much about money, then what’d you want to live all the way out here in this shithole part of town for?"

"I like the view," Em said, and winked at him.

What he wanted to say back was _I sure hope you’re planning to stick around because I think you’re real cute,_ but it came out as, “Yeah, it’s pretty nice,” and he kicked himself, inside, for not even making an attempt to flirt back.

* * *

There was one night in early October, maybe a month and a half after they’d met, when Junior got home late and saw Em outside in her lawn chair, wearing her ratty maroon hoodie with the white “CMU” letters on it and drinking a sparkling water, with a roaring fire going in a firebowl in the space between their trailers. “You know fires like that’re illegal, right?” he said, as he awkwardly got out of the car, trying not to bump his right elbow.

“Are you going to arrest me?” she said with a smile, as he slammed the car door. He just shook his head with a smile back at her, as he headed inside his own trailer to grab a beer and join her back outside. “It’s getting cold out,” she said as he sat down next to her, in his own lawn chair, and shifted his right arm inside the sling. His collarbone was healing up just fine, but he still needed the occasional pill or two from the stash she’d given him to get through the days. “I thought it’d be nice.”

“How’d you learn to build a fire, anyway?” Junior asked as he carefully lit a cigarette. It was a pine fire, well stoked and crackling nicely, and the warmth it was giving off felt wonderful against the chill of the night. “Thought you grew up in the city.”

“I went to one year of Girl Scout camp,” she said. “I learned this, how to ride a horse, what the Milky Way looks like on a clear summer night, and how it feels to get picked on by someone besides my sisters.” She looked embarrassed after those last words, like she’d accidentally admitted something she didn’t want to reveal. _Sisters, at least two and I’ll bet they’re older if they were picking on her_. “Anyway, that’s ancient history,” she said. “Tell me the craziest thing you saw today.”

“I got two words for you on that subject,” Junior said, taking a drag off his cigarette. “Naked Armenian.”

“Naked Armenian?” Em asked, turning to look in his direction, and the flickering firelight shone through her hair, illuminated half of her face, softened the curve of her cheek. _Holy shit_. _She was cute before, but right now, I ain’t got the faintest idea how it happened, but she’s downright beautiful._

“He’s a frequent flier. Loves takin’ ecstasy and losin’ his pants,” he said, trying to keep it together. “Hell, I’ve brought him in a coupla times. Least it was Dangle haulin’ him out of the titty bar today, not like last time Jones went down there and made it take three fuckin’ hours.” He cringed a little, on the inside, wishing he’d told a slightly more dignified story, but Em didn’t seem to mind.

“That reminds me of a story from college,” she said. Em was the first person who Junior had talked to for any length of time who had gone to not just college, but also to graduate school, and somehow managed not to sound like a condescending asshole about it. It seemed like she had college stories for almost every situation. “There’s no strip clubs, but I’ll try and keep it interesting.”

She got up from her chair and added another chunk of pine to the fire as she began. “It was the start of my second year of college and my roommate and best friend Rachel and I had just moved out of the dorms into our own place. We rented this giant house with no air conditioning and it was August, so it was incredibly hot and humid out in Pittsburgh, and I thought we were in a perfectly safe neighborhood, so I kept the windows open all the time.”

“That sounds like a real bad idea,” Junior said. An especially large pop from the fire sent up a shower of sparks, dancing on the flames.

“Hey, I was twenty, everyone has bad ideas at that age,” Em said. “Anyway, it was the first night of the semester. I was stuck in this required math class and it was obvious, even that early, that I was going to fail. I didn’t understand half the stuff on the syllabus and the professor was this old guy with a super thick accent who’d make fun of anyone who asked questions that he thought were dumb. And the TA—”

“The who?” he asked, interrupting her. This happened to him a lot when she told stories about college, but she never made him feel bad for asking whenever she had to stop and explain something.

“Oh, sorry. The teaching assistant,” Em said. “They take roll, grade your papers, do all the grunt work that the professors don’t want to do. This one was a math grad student, he had the biggest, fluffiest, most perfectly eighties mullet I’d ever seen. I can’t even remember his name now. I just think of him as Mullet Guy.”

Junior nodded as he finished his beer. “You want one?” he said, indicating the empty can.

“Sure,” Em said, and thanked him when he returned with fresh drinks. “So I’m in bed that night and I’m trying to sleep, but I’m really just worrying about this class, because if I don’t pass it, my dad is going to kill me.” Junior was already listening closely to her story, but he caught the end of that sentence and tried not to let it show on his face that he’d heard what he thought he’d heard. _Her dad’s got high expectations and it sounds like she’s worried about living up to them_.

He looked over at her to see that Em had that embarrassed look on her face again, and she started talking louder and faster. “All of a sudden, I hear a creaking noise, and then a crashing noise, and then a weird rumbling coming from downstairs, and Rachel comes into my room, saying as quietly as she can, which is still pretty loud, ‘I think someone broke into the house, what are we going to do?!’ and I grab the only thing I can find that’s large and pointy, which is a golf umbrella, and we sneak downstairs trying to be quiet, and turn on the kitchen light, and what do we see?”

“What was it?” he asked, lightly. He didn’t want to let on that he knew she’d told him something that she didn’t want to talk about—and at the same time, he was honestly curious about what was going to happen next.

“Mullet Guy,” Em said, “completely naked, passed out drunk on the kitchen counter, with his feet in the sink and snoring at top volume.”

They both laughed, her more than him, and that diffused all of the tension, put her back at ease. “Did you call the cops?” he asked.

“No,” Em said, tucking her hair back behind her ears. “I poked him with the golf umbrella until he woke up, but then he fell off the counter. I felt bad for him, so I gave him my bathrobe, made him some coffee, and when he sobered up a little more, I drove him back home.” She took a drink, contemplatively. “But you know what the worst part was?”

“What’s that?” Junior said, watching her as she watched the fire, though she turned her head to look at him and smiled softly, the dimple in her cheek revealing itself.

“I had to see him again in class two days later!” Em said. “And twice a week for the whole rest of the semester after that!” That made him laugh, and then she started laughing again too. “He tried to apologize to me after class,” she said, wheezing, “but all I said back to him was, ‘I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ and we never spoke about it again. And then, after spending all semester driving myself crazy trying to pass the class, I completely bombed the final and got a B-plus in the course anyway. I think he felt guilty about the whole sink thing,” she finished, with a note of triumph in her voice.

They clinked their cans together and drank, toasting her years-old achievement. “Shit,” Junior said, “that story makes me think there’s other places in the world just as fucked-up as Reno.”

“Other people, more like. There’s no place I’d rather be right now,” Em said, looking straight ahead at the fire, and he suddenly felt several degrees warmer all over and not just where the fire was toasting him.

The next day, after finding out that little bit of information about Em’s family, Junior tried to Google her at work. However, all he typed in was "m dalton" and that just brought up some obituaries of people named Maria and Mike, a few home-grown websites about Reno’s supposedly haunted Dalton House, and pages and pages of results about the Dalton Mining Company, “North America’s largest gold mining company, continuously creating value with responsible and sustainable mining solutions.”

He poked around in those pages for a while, even skimming through Dalton Mining CEO Jack Dalton’s Wikipedia page and clicking through some of the links there, but he also figured there were probably plenty of people named Dalton in the world, and then he started to feel guilty for snooping into something that might not even be relevant to something that Em clearly didn’t want to talk about. He didn’t usually bother covering his tracks when he was messing around online, but this time he made sure to clear out the browser history before closing the window.

* * *

When Halloween arrived, Junior was still stuck working the desk. Halloween was normally the Sheriff’s Department’s worst nightmare, but this year it was busy instead of chaotic. Late in the evening, he found himself entirely alone at the station, with everyone else out responding to other calls and with nothing else coming in. In any other situation, this would have been a clear invitation to turn off the station computer’s antivirus software and go searching for some porn to pass the time, but this evening, Junior just wasn’t in the mood.

He kept thinking about what Em might be up to, and after going back and forth for about five hesitant minutes, he finally grabbed the phone and dialed her number before he could talk himself out of it. The phone rang twice before she picked up.

“Hello?” Em answered, sounding slightly puzzled. Junior realized, too late, that it was 11:30 at night.

“Oh, shit! Hey, it’s Junior. Sorry, did I wake you up?” he asked. _Fuck, normal people ain’t got these fucked-up schedules, even if they ain’t working at regular jobs_.

“No, I’m in bed but I was still up reading,” she replied. “I just didn’t recognize the number.”

“It’s the station,” he said. “I’m stuck here and nothin’s goin’ on. I just wanted to see how you were doin’ and I didn’t realize it was so late.” He let out a measured breath in an attempt to diffuse some of his anxiety, which was not helped by Em mentioning that she was in bed.

“Nothing’s happening out here either,” Em said. “You’d barely know it was Halloween.”

"It’s usually the worst night of the year," he said. "Most years I'm out bustin' up frat parties or stealin' Wiegel's cat."

"The dead one?" Em asked. "I think I remember you telling me about it."

"That’s the one," Junior said. _I bet I could have made an easy hundred bucks holding it for ransom this year_. He decided to keep that to himself, though, because Em definitely didn’t need to know about the various petty hustles he’d engage in to supplement his meager Sheriff’s Department salary. Like that buddy of Big Mike’s who’d given him enough cash for the rest of the remaining oxys to cover most of his October rent, or the guy down in Truckee with only seven fingers who’d buy all the confiscated fireworks that he could sneak out of the evidence room or any explosives that he could skim off the ordnance orders, no questions asked.

"Want me to stay on the line? I'll keep you company for a while," she said, and that made him feel both better and worse, at the same time. Better, because she was willing to spend the time talking with him, and worse, because that brought the anxiety up another level.

"Tell you what," he said, "hold on a sec." He put her on hold and switched her over to line five, to keep the main phone line clear, then hit the button to bring her back. "There we go. Still there?"

"I'm still here," Em said, and that small admission mixed a thread of delight in with the nerves, along with relief that he’d correctly switched over the phone line.

"If anythin' comes in that I gotta deal with, I'll hafta put you on hold," he warned her. "And it might take a while." He figured he’d better get that out in the open right now, because technically he was still at work.

"I don’t mind waiting," she said. “I’ll stay as long as you like. Trust me, I love talking to you," and Junior was suddenly glad that the station was deserted, because he could feel himself quietly freaking out inside.

"Um, uh, I, uh," he said, suddenly stumbling over the words, because what he wanted to say was _I love talkin' to you too_ , but what came out instead was, "Oh shit, somethin's coming in, hold on a sec," even though there wasn't actually anything, and he just hit the hold button and put the headset down and took a few deep breaths. _Just calm down, you're okay, it's fine. It's just a phone call. You called her. She's the same on the phone as she is in person, even though it seems like she likes you as much as you like her. Fuck, it’s like being back in fuckin' high school, it never gets easier._

He picked up the headset, hit the hold button again. "Everything okay?" Em asked.

"Yeah," Junior said. "Just a, uh, wrong number." _God, I feel like such a fuckin’ idiot right now_. “Um, what’re you readin’?”

“I found a collection of quote-unquote creepy stories down at the bookstore,” she said. “It seemed appropriate for the holiday, but they’re kind of duds. The only decent thing in it is some Poe.”

“Who?” he asked. He didn’t get most of her literary references, either, but just like the college stories, she had a way of explaining things that didn’t make him feel bad for not knowing what she was talking about.

“Oh, sorry. Edgar Allen Poe,” she said. “American mystery writer who married his first cousin, wrote a whole bunch of super creepy poems and short stories, someone shows up every year at his grave on his birthday and makes a toast to him, but no one knows who it is. Basically, a complete wackjob.”

“Sounds like he’d fit right in out here in Reno,” Junior said. “Hell, I think Dangle and Clemmy brought in someone like that last week.”

“I could totally see you guys arresting Poe for getting into a drunk slap fight with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,” Em said. “How about I read you _The Raven_? It’s pretty short and it’s perfect for tonight.”

It took a few tries—a couple of calls came through that Junior had to deal with—but Em eventually got through the entire poem in one unbroken shot. She had an absolutely perfect way of reading out loud, even if he couldn’t quite follow what the poem was about. By the third try, he’d stopped paying close attention to the words and just listened to the cadence of her smooth voice as it slipped over the sibilant S’s and repeated the echoing chorus of “Nevermore.” He closed his eyes when she said, “Let my heart be still a moment,” and imagined her lips moving on the other end of the phone, the fall of her dark hair, thought about what she said before about being in bed.

By the end, all he could say was, “Damn,” as he couldn’t tell if the tingles up his spine were from the image in his head of her on the line, the sound of her voice, or both.

“What’d I tell you?” Em said. “Perfect, right?”

“You got that right,” he agreed. _I think that’s about one of the hottest things I ever did with my clothes still on._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> While canon provides a surprising amount of information about the backstories of the other deputies, Junior’s remains a little more of a mystery, either deliberately or by accident. I extrapolated a few things and made some reasonable guesses on the others.


	3. Watch Each Other Falling

_Growing closer, going for it, and the gun range._

* * *

It was the middle of November before Junior’s collarbone healed up enough to where the doctor let him stop wearing the sling entirely, but he still had two weeks to go before being cleared to go back out in the field for any reason, even for speed-trapping. The doctor had said something about liability and delayed aftereffects and a whole bunch of other complicated-sounding medical terms, but the end result was, Junior rolled into the station after his appointment, handed Dangle the doctor’s note, and felt the slightest bit guilty as he did. Dangle had looked so hopeful, too—Junior knew Dangle had been stuck going out on patrol with mostly Wiegel for the past couple of months and that he was dying for an excuse to get away from her—but salvation was not going to come today. “Two more fucking weeks, man?” Dangle said, shaking his head. “If I have to listen to one more story about Trudy’s goddamn cats, I’m going to shoot her.”

“You can fuckin’ thank Garcia for it,” Junior said, taking up his now-habitual position at the booking desk. “Just send Wiegel out with him one of these days instead.”

“He’d shoot her for real, though,” Dangle said, as the phone rang, and that put an end to their conversation.

Working the desk wasn’t so bad, most days, but today was not one of those days. It was busier than usual and when the other deputies saw that Junior wasn’t wearing the sling and appeared to be back to normal, they ignored his explanation that he was still two weeks away from being totally cleared and dumped all the booking paperwork back on him to fill out. And then at the end of his shift, he ended up having to stay for three extra hours when Williams called out because of “a crisis with her kid,” which he strongly suspected was nowhere near as dire as it sounded. Clemmy finally showed up around ten-thirty to relieve him, and he practically threw the phone at her because he’d been at the station for almost twelve hours at that point.

The traffic was light enough, this late at night, that he didn't have to concentrate too hard on driving home. It was much easier driving, too, now that he had both his hands free, even if his shoulder did occasionally send up a thin flare of pain when he moved it the wrong way. But he spent the trip home chewing over a problem that had come to occupy his thoughts more and more lately: what was he going to do about Em?

All the years of dealing with the seedy underbelly of society had given Junior that uncanny ability to detect the truth, but it had also completely ruined any chance he might have had of understanding how a normal relationship with a normal woman was supposed to work. Or maybe it was a result of his relative inexperience in that particular area—not that he would ever openly admit that to anyone. Since he’d made it out to Reno, his romantic history had been exclusively on the paid-professional end of the spectrum, and up until this point, he’d preferred to keep it that way. Working for the Sheriff’s Department was a daily reminder of all the ways that getting intimately involved with someone else could go horribly, horribly wrong.

But one thing had become crystal-clear to him over the past few months: he liked Em, a lot, and it went deeper than just wanting to get laid. He wasn't sure if it was love (or even what being in love was like, and that thing with the stripper a few years ago definitely wasn’t it), but he knew that he liked spending time with her. He looked forward to seeing her at the end of the day and talking with her. And the way she smiled at him made him feel like the most important person in the world.

When Junior thought about it, all of those things seemed like a pretty good place to start from. He just had no idea how to go about actually getting started, even though he was pretty sure that Em liked him, too. She’d come all the way from Denver just to end up living right next to him, and she'd been flirting with him a lot over the past few months. Or at least she’d been making a lot of comments that could be interpreted as flirting, in the right context. But at the same time, part of him was absolutely terrified of making the wrong move and somehow screwing everything up. What if he were reading everything wrong and she just wanted to stay friends? He especially didn't want to end up stuck in limbo like Garcia was with Clemmy. That was just sad all around.

 _Just my luck I end up falling for the only normal woman in Reno. Everything'd be so much fuckin’ easier if she_ were _a hooker._ With that thought, he finally pulled into his parking space and saw that the light outside of Em's trailer was still on.

She poked her head out of the door, her dark hair falling loose to the side, as he slammed the car door behind him. "Hey, you're home late!" she said. _Fuck, that sounds nice the way she says it, you’re home_.

“Ah, yeah, they still got me on the desk,” Junior said, “and Williams called off, so I got stuck waitin’ for Clemmy to come in. It ain’t hard, but it’s hard, you know?”

"I think so," Em said, coming down the steps of her trailer. She was wearing her old maroon CMU hoodie, dark gray pajama pants, and her beat-up gray Chuck Taylors. "Want some company?"

No matter how long a day it had been, or how much Junior might have wanted to just crawl into bed and get some sleep, he wasn’t about to turn down that kind of offer. "Yeah, but lemme change and grab a beer first," he said, as Em pushed up her sleeves and took a couple of pieces of firewood off the pile. The nights were getting colder and the campfires she’d build in the firebowl when they’d hang out, late at night, had turned into a near-necessity. Besides, it wasn’t as though he was going to invite her inside his trailer—having her in there the first day that they’d met was bad enough.

Five minutes later, they clinked a cheers and settled into the lawn chairs in the empty lot between their trailers, as the small fire Em had built in the firebowl started to crackle. “How’d your doctor’s appointment go?” Em asked.

“Fuck, how do you remember shit like that?” Junior took a pull off the beer and shook his head. “I didn’t realize it was today until they called me about it yesterday.”

“You mentioned it last week, and you’re not wearing the sling anymore,” Em said, with one of those smiles. “Are they sending you back out there?”

“Not yet,” he said, putting the beer down and lighting up a cigarette. “I got two more weeks before the doctor’ll clear me for anything but answerin’ the phone and fillin’ out everyone else’s paperwork.” He took a drag, exhaled a contemplative sigh of smoke to mingle with that of the fire. _I’d almost go out speed-trapping with Wiegel, that’s how fuckin’ sick I am of that place right now_.

"It can’t be all bad,” Em said. “I bet it's a lot safer back at the station.”

"Oh, sure," Junior said. "Lot fewer people shootin' at me, for one." He snuck a sideways look at her, in the glow of the firelight, like he’d been doing every night they had a fire, and every time he found her just as beautiful as the first time he’d seen her in that light.

"Do you get shot at a lot?" she asked, looking back at him, and that snapped him back to their conversation.

"Enough so's the Kevlar ain't just decoration," he said, thinking back to the last time he’d found that was the case. "It definitely works." He’d escaped with a cloud of deep bruises that took a week to heal, but no broken ribs, and considered himself lucky.

Em shivered a little, despite the warmth of the fire. "You know I've never even held a gun before?" she said, almost to herself.

"Never?" Junior said. "Shit. We can fix that right fuckin' now." He pitched the rest of his cigarette into the fire and headed for his trailer, coming back a few minutes later with a couple of small, locked cases. "Hold this for me, would ya?" he said, handing her one of them.

Em held the box while he unlocked it, pocketed the keys, and removed the gun, a Ruger Mark II. Junior held the pistol in his left hand while he released the magazine, checked that the chamber was clear, racked the slide a few times, then aimed it out into the desert and dry-fired it a couple of times. Em had put the box down by the time he held the pistol out to her, handle first. "Just don't point the barrel at anythin' you don't want to shoot, and don't put your finger on the trigger unless you're gonna fire it," he said.

"Are...are you sure?" Em asked, her hazel eyes wide in the firelight. She looked nervous and almost a little scared.

"Trust me, it ain't loaded, and it's just a twenty-two," Junior said. "I use it to warm up, down at the range." He didn’t understand how people could be afraid of guns; they were just tools that could be used to get a job done, and they weren’t dangerous as long as they were handled safely.

Em looked straight at him, illuminated by the fire, and he saw a strange look on her face, unfathomable and yet entirely resolute—but it was gone in an instant. She took the pistol, gingerly, with both hands. "It's heavier than I thought it'd be," she said.

“Cuts down on the recoil,” he said. "But here, check it out next to the Beretta." Em handed the Ruger back to him, brushing his hand lightly with her fingertips as she did. He nearly dropped the Ruger at the shock of the incidental contact but managed to get it back safely in its case, before repeating the same ritual, except this time with the pistol he carried for work.

“I see what you mean," she said, as the nine-millimeter Beretta was substantially lighter, even though it held a larger shell. She handed the pistol back to him, managing to accidentally touch his hand again. This time he kept it together a little better. _That sure felt like a hint_.

"You know, if you ever wanna actually shoot a gun instead of just holdin’ it, we could go hit the range sometime..." Junior trailed off. This might have been a bridge too far, but he looked over at Em to see that there was a small smile on her face, revealing just a hint of the dimple in her cheek.

"That sounds like a nice idea," she said. "I'd like to learn."

"How 'bout I come get you on my next day off? I like goin' to the range right when they open, there's less people there," he said. There was a small range down at the station with a couple of shooting lanes, but Junior favored a local army-surplus store with a larger range in its basement. He didn’t like anyone from the station watching him practice, especially now after his injury.

“It’s a date,” Em said, and Junior’s heart skipped a beat. _Shit. A date. I got a date._

His next day off was two days away, enough time for him to flip between anxiety and confidence about ten times each hour, it seemed. Junior couldn’t remember the last time he’d been on an actual date, and almost winning tickets to an execution didn’t count. He finally resolved to treat it just like a normal thing that people did and not attach any outsized expectations to it, even if a little voice in the back of his head kept saying _Cute girls asking to go shoot guns with you is pretty hot_.

Junior knocked on the door to Em's trailer around 10:30 that morning, only to hear a muffled, "It's open, come in," from inside. He was acutely aware of not having been inside her place for a while, and at this time of the morning too, so he let himself in carefully. The stacks of books were mostly confined to just the table and chairs this time, with a closed composition book at the top of one of the stacks.

"I'm sorry," Em said, peeking out from the half-open bedroom door, wrapped in a thick white towel. "I thought I'd be ready, but I'm running late. Give me like five, ten minutes?"

"Sure, um, whatever you need," he said, taking a seat on the couch and trying to stay calm.

"What do I wear to a gun range, anyway?" she asked through the door, and Junior swallowed hard, imagining the scene on the other side.

"Somethin’ comfortable," he eventually said. The question was largely rhetorical—Em emerged in a black long-sleeved T-shirt, dark jeans, and her old gray Chucks—and they got under way.

Em fixed her hair while they were on the road, fashioning some kind of complicated braid that she claimed would stay up all day and keep her hair out of her face. It mostly served to throw the scent of what must have been her shampoo all over the car, which was somehow both sharp and soft at the same time, and surprisingly pleasant. In Junior’s experience, most women smelled like either flowers or food, and sometimes both at once. Clemmy favored a particularly sticky-sweet perfume that smelled okay on her, but terrible whenever he had the misfortune of getting a whiff of it on Garcia. But this was different—it reminded him, of all things, of a sunrise over the mountains on an early spring morning, just as the fog was burning off. It smelled like possibility.

The range had just opened when they arrived, and as a result, it was completely deserted. Junior picked out some targets and paid for an hour, to start, and they chose the lane farthest away from the counter. "All right," he said, taking out the Ruger. "First thing, are you right or left-handed?"

"Right," Em said, as she pushed up her sleeves. “Does it matter, for something like this?”

"Yeah, a little bit,” he said. “You’ll see in a minute. Just make sure the barrel's always pointin' down range, no matter what.” He picked up the Ruger and demonstrated as he said, “Here's the sights, one on the front, two on the back. Line up the front one with the back one, that's how you aim." He took out one of the full magazines and popped it in with a click.

"Here's how you hold it," he said, showing her how to seat the handle solidly in her grip. This, of course, required him to reach around her shoulders and actually fold her fingers around the handle, and that sharp-soft sunrise smell of her hair mixed with the old-gunpowder smell of the range was one of the nicest things he’d smelled in a while.

"Make sure to keep your thumbs below the slide, else it'll hurt like a sumbitch and you'll probably need stitches," he said, and Em nodded. "When you're ready, put your finger on the trigger and squeeze."

Em took a deep breath, then held the Ruger out and fired. "Wow!" she said. "That was...amazing! Did I hit anything?"

"I think you mighta done better if you kept your eyes open," Junior said. "But you got nine more in the clip. Try it again."

They ended up staying for about two and a half hours, taking turns with the Ruger. Em was impressed with his skills, even shooting left-handed—he had to switch after an hour, his shoulder hurt too much to keep going with his right hand. But he didn’t want to stop, since every time they traded, it meant another excuse to slide in close to her, to show her some little physical nuance, to study her closely in a way that he hadn’t had a chance to previously. And another reason to touch her hands as they passed the Ruger back and forth. His original assessment had been mostly correct: cute girls asking to shoot guns was not pretty hot. In practice, it was incredibly hot.

At the end, despite the distractions, he was pleased to confirm that he was still, hands down, the best shot in the department, and that he wasn't too badly out of practice. His final target was the best of them all; they'd been sharing targets all day, and after Em shot first at the bull's-eye in the chest, he took over and put all ten in the bull's-eye in the head, grouped in a space no larger than a quarter, left-handed. It did not escape his attention that when they were done, she folded up the target and tucked it into her purse.

"It’s not really a big deal," Junior said later, over lunch.

"No, it is a big deal," Em said. "I can tell, it's important to you." He felt a frisson of delight. _She gets it._ He supposed it had something to do with the way she never made him feel dumb when she had to explain things—no matter how ridiculous something sounded, if he took it seriously, she'd take it seriously, too. He'd never had someone understand him like that before, and that just made him like her even more.

On the drive back home, she took her hair down, raked her fingers through it to get out any stray tangles. “Still wet,” she said, and he hoped she didn’t notice the measured way he let out his breath, couldn’t see his hands shake on the wheel. _There ain’t no way that was just an innocent comment_. He snuck a quick look over at Em to see that she was looking straight ahead, perfectly serene, entirely composed.

He made the last turn into the trailer park, half dreading what was going to happen when they finally arrived back home. Was she expecting him to kiss her, or not? Would she be offended if he did, or if he didn’t? It felt like there was no right answer, like he’d fuck it all up no matter what he did.

He parked in his parking space and turned the car off, but before he could say or do anything, his phone started to ring. “Jesus fuck,” he said, half to himself and half to Em, pulling the phone out to see that it was the station number. “It’s work, I gotta fuckin’ take this.”

“It’s all right,” Em said. “Thanks for taking me, I had a really good time.” She flashed him a brilliant smile and slipped out of the car before he could pick up the phone. He watched her disappear into her trailer as he fairly punched the call button, half relieved and half disappointed.

“Travis?” It was Dangle, who didn’t wait for Junior to even say hello. “Look, I know you had today off, but can you please get down here as soon as possible? Jones and Garcia haven’t come back from patrol yet and I need you to hold down the fort while I track them down.” He sounded more flustered than usual. “I’ll make it worth your while. Please tell me you’re not too fucked-up yet.”

“Fine,” Junior said. “I’ll be there, gimme twenty minutes.” He suddenly wanted to be anywhere but home, and having Dangle owe him a favor wouldn’t be too terrible. And “worth your while” turned out to be an extra forty bucks in cash, to boot.

But he spent the next six hours at the station going over the drive home from the gun range, and those last few minutes, in painstaking and agonizing detail, and coming to the same conclusions each time—he probably should have kissed her, but then again, since he didn’t, he hadn’t actually ruined anything yet.

Nonetheless, when he got back home later that night, he jerked off so hard that the decrepit Winnebago shook on its foundation, and he hoped to God Em wasn’t awake to notice that that’s what was going on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can’t claim to be an expert in gun safety, but the tips given in this chapter are a reasonable place to begin. Always assume that a firearm is loaded, even if you have just checked to see that it is not, and never point a firearm at anything or anyone that you don’t intend to shoot.
> 
> If you wish to handle or discharge a firearm in real life, please consult with a qualified professional first—and do so safely, soberly, and in accordance with all applicable laws and statutes of your area of residence.


	4. The Only Feeling That You Know

_Personal frustrations, fear of failure, and fireworks._

* * *

Junior was still no closer to solving his Em problem, mostly because once he’d been cleared to resume his regular job duties again, Dangle hit him with overnight shift after overnight shift, almost out of spite—though he certainly couldn’t prove it. But complaining about his schedule would have only made things worse, so he just resolved to endure it as best he could. It was tough, though, getting home at seven or eight in the morning each day and not being able to hang out with or even really talk to Em.

And then by the middle of December, it was time for the holiday schedule, and that threw everything into even more disarray than usual. Anyone without kids or a family had the chance for near-unlimited overtime over the holidays, which turned the skimpy Sheriff’s Department salary into something that almost approached a reasonable wage.

At the same time, it had become clear over the past few months that Junior’s old Winnebago wasn’t much longer for this earth, and so when it was time to sign up for the holiday shifts, he seized the opportunity to pick up as much overtime as possible to make a dent in what it would take to get a new trailer. Christmas in Reno mostly meant extra drunk and disorderlies and domestic disputes, and those were usually pretty easy to deal with, so getting paid time and a half for doing what he’d be doing anyway was a nice bonus.

Even though he told himself this was just temporary, Junior missed talking with Em and the easy rapport they’d built over the fall, and he was still frustrated about how their first (and so far, only) date had ended. But it wasn’t as if Em were around, either—she had mentioned having holiday plans on one of the few times they’d been able to talk and had headed out of town on the afternoon of Christmas Eve. When he asked where she was going, she just said, “I promised I’d meet up with Rachel for Christmas, but I’ll be back right after New Year’s,” and gave him an envelope that he managed to keep from opening until about an hour after she’d left.

There was a tastefully festive Christmas card inside and a piece of paper tucked inside it. It read, “Next time you get down to the range, it’s on me. Merry Christmas. Yours, Em.” The piece of paper was a hand-drawn gift certificate for the gun range—he didn’t even know they offered those—and when he called them up to ask about it, they told him she’d set him up an account with about four months of credit on it, if he went down there once a week. It was, quite honestly, one of the most thoughtful gifts he’d ever received.

Junior kept meaning to text Em to thank her, or just to say something, but he couldn’t seem to find the right words. Nothing seemed quite right to say while she was gone. Plus, this year, the fine citizens of Reno seemed to have deferred all of their crazy antics from Halloween to Christmas. Christmas Day felt especially sad, when it was all he could do to steal twenty minutes between domestic disturbance calls to bolt down some re-microwaved takeout Chinese food and think about what Em was doing, wherever she was, and to wonder if she were thinking about him, too.

The day after Christmas, he got roped into covering a couple of shifts for Clemmy when she had to run down to Carson City to bail out her mom Beulah (even though it meant sleeping overnight at the station), and she thanked him with a handle of Jack Daniel’s and a promise that she’d cover for him sometime in the future, which he only half believed. But when Junior finally made it back home after all of that and saw that Em’s Jeep was right back in its parking space, four full days before she said she’d be home, his first thought was relief, that she was back, and then panic, because he hadn’t had a chance to even think about getting her any kind of present in return for the thoughtful one that she’d gotten him. For the moment, it was enough to know that Em was back in Reno, even if he was still on the hook for three more grueling days of holiday overtime.

The idea for Em’s present finally came to him late on the last day of the year, as he was rummaging through his locker and found an old pair of black-framed sunglasses, the ones he’d worn during the first year of the show. He’d long since replaced them, but then he remembered that Em had first seen him on the show, and if it was a little bit sentimental of a present, then fuck it, he’d be sentimental.

He wrapped them up carefully in newspaper and put them in the glovebox of his car, ready for when he’d finally have a chance to see her again. Junior had banked so much overtime that he was due for at least four solid days off, and he had finally decided that once he got back onto a normal schedule, the first thing he’d do was march right over to Em’s and tell her exactly how he felt about her—and hope that she felt the same way. Though that “Yours” written on the Christmas card was a very promising sign.

However, Junior’s last holiday shift was a real kick in the teeth for these plans. It was a continual parade of distressed, pitiful old people with problems that he couldn’t even begin to fix. The worst was the old woman wandering down the street, only half dressed despite the cold, and dragging a broken water heater behind her. She never gave her name but alternately screamed and muttered, both equally incoherent, and she physically fought every attempt to put her in the squad car. When the guys from the county hospital showed up at the station to take her with them, they treated her with such indifference, it was like she wasn’t even a person to them, just an inconvenience.

Junior drove home shortly after that, shaken by what he’d seen that day. The job didn’t normally affect him that much, but repeatedly seeing old people having the worst day of their lives, and so many of them, one right after the other, made him even more determined. Taking the first tiny step toward not dying crazy and alone would be telling Em how he felt about her. It was entirely possible that she would reject him, or say that she just wanted to be friends, or that they’d eventually break up, but the old woman’s plight had really gotten to him. He had to do _something_. If it didn’t work, he’d figure out something else.

He’d gotten home on autopilot, but as he pulled into his parking spot, he noticed that something wasn’t right. Both Em’s trailer and the Jeep were gone, in the deepening twilight.

Junior turned off the car and the lights but left his hands on the wheel. _**Motherfucker**_.

He pulled out his phone, dialed her number as fast as he could, but it went straight to voice mail. He didn't leave a message, hung up, tried again. Straight to voice mail.

His next thought was, _She got in an accident,_ so he called the station, but it rang twice down there, and by the time someone picked up, he'd realized that if that were the case, the Gulf Stream would still be there. He hung up without saying a word to whoever it was on the other end—it sounded like Wiegel, but he couldn't really tell—and just stared at the empty space.

_I missed my chance._ _I was too much of a fuckin' coward to say anything and now she's gone without saying goodbye and I missed it._

Junior left the car, slammed the door behind him, didn't even notice the cold outside. _It's all because of the fuckin' show, she was just some weird groupie who saw me on TV and wanted to fuck with my head_. But that thought was far more spiteful than he really felt.He unlocked his own trailer, turned up the heat, took a long pull of whiskey straight off the bottle. _She probably got sick of it out here anyway,_ _she took off for someplace a lot less fucked-up than fuckin' Reno._ And the anger building, at her a little but mostly at himself as he nearly put his fist through the wall. _I bet she thought I was a fuckin' idiot, and I sure as fuck feel like one right now. I had so much time to just tell her—I could have just fuckin’ said something—just once—_

Headlights flashed in the window and he heard the crunch of tires on gravel. " **Who the fuck’s out there?!** ” he yelled, reaching for the Mossberg shotgun almost by instinct.

"Junior, it's me!" Em yelled back at him. "Just me, I'm sorry!"

"Em?" he called as he opened the door, almost in disbelief. "Where the fuck were you?" _Jesus fuck, she’s really here_. _She didn’t leave after all._ He’d never been more relieved to be wrong about something in his entire life.

“I got caught in traffic,” she said, slamming the Jeep’s door. “Big Mike’s got some kind of nonsense going on down at his place, it’s on the regular radio, and I don’t know my way around Reno nearly as well as you.”

“Where’s your trailer?” he said, a little calmer now that she was here, right in front of him.

“The heat wasn’t working. They’re fixing it at the dealership and bringing it back,” Em said, crossing in front of the Jeep as he made his way down the steps of his own trailer. They faced one another in the empty lot between their trailers, by the firebowl, in the cold of the night.

“I tried callin’ you,” Junior said. “You didn’t pick up.” It came out more like an accusation than he wanted, and the look on her face made him instantly regret the tone of voice that he’d used. But he only saw it for a moment, as the Jeep’s headlights died and the only light left was coming from the open door of his trailer, a thin beam against the darkness outside.

“My phone died this morning,” Em said. She pulled the lapels of her navy wool peacoat tighter, against the cold, and took a step closer to him.

“I thought—” he said and stopped. _If there ever was a time, this is the time._ The whiskey and the knowing that she was really still there, that she hadn’t left, combined to spur him on. “I thought you’d left for good and I missed my chance.”

"Oh, Junior," she said, bringing her hands up to the sides of his face. "Trust me, I'm not going anywhere without you." And then, before he could say or do anything else, she leaned in to kiss him.

It was, without a doubt, the best kiss of Junior's life. Not that he had too many points of comparison; hookers didn't much go in for kissing, and anything that happened back in high school didn't really seem to count. Her lips were soft and warm, light and hesitant at first, then more confident as they both relaxed. It felt like the most natural thing in the world, like something had started that he never wanted to stop. When they finally broke apart after what seemed like an eternity, he couldn’t think of anything to say but "Wow."

"Wow yourself," Em said, smiling at him, the dimple in her cheek deepening. “I should have done that a while ago.”

“Both of us should’ve,” he said. “But I ain’t lettin’ it stop me now.” _I don’t know what the fuck I was waiting for._ _Fuck, none of that matters anymore._

“Can you do one thing for me, though?” she asked.

“Anything,” he said, and meant it.

“Can we go inside? It’s cold out here,” she said, and let him lead the way.

The rest of the evening was kind of a delicious blur, with a few notable things that stood out. Em eventually remembered to plug her phone in and when she did, there was a message from the dealership that said they’d bring her trailer back in the morning. “I thought this might happen,” she said.

“Fuck, just stay here,” Junior said. “Please.” He didn’t really think she was going to leave, especially when she threw the phone aside and made her way back to the bed, the only space in his trailer that was big enough to hold the two of them.

“All right, if you insist,” Em said, with a small smile, and started to kiss him again, but when he went to take off his shirt, she stopped him. “Let’s take this slow,” she said. “Have you ever done that before?”

The real answer to that question was somewhere between _No_ and _Fuck no_ , but instead, he said, “Not exactly.”

“Me either,” she said, “and I want to try it out.” He would have agreed to almost anything in that moment, to give her whatever she wanted. And after waiting this long just to kiss her, waiting a little bit longer to go farther didn’t seem like too terrible a prospect.

“Anythin’ you say,” he said, kissing her again soft and slow and deep, over and over again until they heard a series of muffled, distant popping sounds. “What in the fuck is that?” he asked, largely rhetorical—there was no way he was leaving to investigate.

“Fireworks, I think,” Em said. “It must be midnight. I forgot it was New Year’s,” she said, with what sounded like a smile, in the dark, and kissed him again. “Happy New Year.”

“Happy New Year,” he said, back to her, and later, as they were falling asleep, curled up together underneath the old threadbare quilt that his grandmother had made, a drowsy revelation came to him. _That’s the first time I had someone to kiss at midnight on New Year’s and I sure hope it ain’t the last_.

**Author's Note:**

> For much of canon (and for the purposes of this story), the existence of the show itself is accepted in-universe. In episode 203, one of the criminals being arrested makes a joke about how he’s going to be on TV, so it doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch for all of the characters, even the original ones, to be aware of the existence of the show itself.


End file.
